Our Swearing-Scribe Keeping Track of the F Word:


I SWEAR THIS IS IMPORTANT.

Do you remember the first time you ever heard the F word? I heard it from an older boy while my brother and I were out in the snow, sliding down Tomato Hill. He described what it meant, giving us an impression of a very cartoonish picture of our parents doing a very strange act. It couldn't mean anything really bad, after all, he told us to go home and tell our mother the F word, and what it means.

My mom got very upset. Called up the mother of this boy, and I can imagine he caught hell. Oops, I said 'hell' ...My scribe in heaven will write that down.

Once there was a therapy I participated in, which utilized any word that would get you from your rational mind into your emotions. That emotional word in the United States is the F word.

I began to wonder about swears and their place in our world. Seems like I' use them more and more when I'm emotionally upset. I think they are like that little weight on top of the pressure cooker that goes pssst...psssst...pssst.... letting off a little steam so that the kettle doesn't explode from its pressure build-up. When you think of swearing and cursing as relieving the inner stress of a world charged up with all kinds of worries of wars, economies, strange flu germs that may lead to a pandemic... if these words can help take off a little of the pressure so that we can better deal with the realities, and let go of the worries leading to nothing, then, don't they have value? Problem: If we let these words become acceptable they lose that power. We must keep them as "bad words" to give them the power to relieve the situation when everything is going wrong in life and you absolutely cannot cope. What a great relief to be able to let off a long string of swears when you are so frustrated that you are ready to kill... or have a stroke, killing yourself in the process of living in a universe in which all does not go as planned.

I think a parent should come down really hard on their children for using swear words. They are too valuable to be made into everyday speech. We need those words to have power. If we parse them, saying, "Think about it, Buck, Cluck, Duck, aren't bad words... neither is Guck, Huck, Juck, Kuck, Muck.... and so on, so who decides that America's worst word is the F word? If it gets too common a usage, then it is jerked up to the M-F word. I have a really bad pressure releaser that if heard you heard me yell that out, your whole opinion of me would probably change. However, I'll have you know that someone or some animal just avoided getting killed (or it felt that way to me). It really works, and I think it is the worst string of swears ever... and it's good I think so. It stays a powerful insurance that I am not going to ever get so frustrated that I do something I'd regret.... as, if that is the worst thing I really could say, maybe God wants us to have these pressure releases, and the threat to us from our parents not to swear is the power given to these unblessed/blessed words. My place in saying these pressure releases is when I'm totally alone. If someone did overhear me, I would apologize and try to explain that it was really better than the alternative thought.

If we overdo it in taking the name of God in vain, and if He also doesn't want us to use the F word ever, and we swear too often, then maybe we pay for these venial sins by being made into one of those scribes who keep track of others swear words. It would be the worst punishment I could think of... keeping track of dirty and religious swear words for God... writing it down, checking it off each time you say it every day. Somedays my list is longer than others, and if I were the scribe instead, and he was I, I'd find my job even more boring if the swearer wasn't giving me much of anything to write down. The real hell to me wouldn't be the keeping track, but the realization that having to keep track of people's bad word is such a freaking waste of time.
"Oops, there you go with that word 'Freaking' again!" Jake in Two and a Half Men